Braiding a Web
by Breaking Bunnies
Summary: A rapunzel raised by a misandrist, a charming rogue who left most of his charm at the door, and their attempts to resist ripping out each other's throats. YinxYuck. A re-imagined version of Disney's 'Tangled.'


Bah, BAH says I! For how can I finish my journey by Santa's visiting hour when half of my roads covered erase themselves from under my feet?

And the dialogue is only slightly less terrible than that sentence.

This was a request from Queenanarchy (MsAnarchy on here), and while I had planned for it to be done by Christmas, and despite all the planning I had had done, I don't think that's gonna happen. The scrapped folder for this is nearly as long as the fic itself thus-far. So, if my head explodes, I want evidence I at least made an attempt.

Title: Braiding a Web (Part 1/?)

Ship: YinxYuck

Summary: A re-imagined version of Disney's _Tangled._ A rapunzel raised by a misandrist, a charming rogue who left most of his charm at the door, and their attempts to resist ripping out each other's throats.

~x~x~x~

The tower is both a prison and a paradise, a one-window cell with no way out but by the thousands of books that fill it.

Every inch of wall space is covered by a bookcase, each having six shelves that reach almost to the ceiling. Some have books squeezed in hardback-to-hardback, others stacked with two layers of paper-bounds, the back layer propped up on empty tissue boxes or old candle jars so that they are visible. And it still isn't enough. Books are overflowing onto the tables, the sofa, into little heaps under the window.

Folklore collections left sitting open to favorite tales. The Brontë sisters stuffed with strips of ribbon marking poignant passages. Recipes for poison, fireworks, and one hundred-and-one flavors of cake spiced heavily with annotations. The off-white tapestries are ornamented not by stitch-work of battles but favorite Emily Dickinsons and Aphra Behns, the center piece of these being her poem "The Disappointment."

And yet "I am half sick of shadows," said The Lady of Shalott.

This is not, however, where our story starts.

~x~x~x~

"_I am your opus,_

_I am your valuable,_

_The pure gold baby_

_{...}_

_Beware._

_Beware._

_Out of the ash_

_I rise with my red hair_

_And I eat men like air."_

—Sylvia Path,_ Lady Lazarus _

~x~x~x~

Her mother disappears out the window, her heavy scarlet robe parachuting around her until she flicks her wand with a loud sizzling sound, and then she's gone.

The pig in the closet has yet to regain consciousness. Yin catches his body against hers as he falls out of the cabinet, setting him down on the floor like a puppet whose strings have been cut. He's about her age, give a year or two, a filthy lad who smells of something powerful, like burning garbage in high summer. And the ideas that no doubt had been swirling around in his little mind like a foul soup must have been worse. Gentlemen couldn't be trusted as far down the bottle as they could look, at the best of times; people like this cove—toshers, thieves, antagonists—weren't worth the stomach contents of a dead rat.

Oh, what to do?

On one hand, she'd just finished brushing her hair; was she really going to sully it anew tying him up?

But, on the other hand, if she pushed him out of the window, he'd more than likely die.

_Is that such a crime? _

Yin giggles at the thought, finally managing to heft the lad over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

—Still, wasn't it such an odd occurrence, his showing up in her tower? Not many knew of it, and those who did likely had burn marks in the shape of a hand across their visages to discourage them (or frankly they just didn't want to visit, which Yin sympathizes with a tiny bit). When was the last time they'd...no, never mind. The answer to that was never. The only Saint Nicholas that visited this tower was her mother's servant, G.P., who from her earliest memories had already essentially given up to the point of only disguising himself in a red woolen cap.

G. P. is still asleep in the cupboard above the sink. Would he call Mother? No, probably not, but he also wouldn't hold a secret just because she requested it.

The cove groans. She carries him across the tower, bones nearly dislocating under the weight, and plops him down by the window.

Heavy sod, but a cute one, with the baby fat still clinging to his cheeks. Not to mention the symmetrized freckles that dot both, the disheveled, jade bowl of hair. Looking just at his face, for a moment Yin could think him incapable of any deed worse than stealing milk money. But his arms and hands are marred heavily with scars of all ages, and peering down the collar of his vest, into the patch of curly, emerald hairs, she notices one of the brightest scarlet flags: A colony of inkings, tattoos, that run across his chest, over his shoulders, down to his elbows. Dragons and hellish reremice slithering through the clouds, the blood dripping from their teeth hitting the ground and blossoming into black hellebore and mushrooms.

_Destroying angels. _She wonders if he has enough knowledge of fungi for that to have been intended. What a tosher may or may not know...well, the only one she's ever met she had instinctively knocked out with a frying pan upon greeting. Maybe later, after the interrogation, she can ask.

Maybe later Mother can wipe his mind clean, make him believe himself a dog, and Yin can make a pillow of his stomach. His skin being repurposed in some way is the only condition under which Mother (and she too) would let him stay.

~x~x~x~

When his eyne flutter open, though fuzzy, he can see the marble stones of the path beneath him, the fresh spring grass. In front of hi—

_Below him. _

He jerks, but the layers of follicles wrapped about him leave little extra space, and the way the motion makes him swing drops hot heaps of lead into his stomach. The cold metal he realizes is encompassing his hands seems to aggravate that feeling, somehow.

The figure by the window is smirking. She wears a simple lavender dress, and behind her he can see the corners of a large, purple bow, see her white hair plaited...until it's coming undone, and as he looks further over her shoulder he sees hair hanging from the rafters, hair over books and heaped, serpentine, along the floor, and finally wrapped around a pulley and around him, the loose strands brushing the tower's midsection in gentle waves.

"Care to explain yourself?" she asks.

It's not that he's afraid of heights; it's not that he's afraid of dying. But the falling'll hurt like a bitch, and he can see the malice in her eyes. Still, malice doesn't mean ability, right? If she wanted to kill him, she'd had her chance. So he furrows his eyebrows, drawling, "Well, lassie, you'll have t' see I'm rather peculiar about who I share the first draft of my memoir with."

She gestures her hand towards him dismissively, and he sucks his teeth for shock as a stinging pain whips across his cheek.

"Oh, but all writers need a second opinion, and it's just the latest chapter that I'm asking for."

"You were the one who knocked me out, weren't you?"

"Why do you ask questions you already know the answers to?" He wants to grind that pompous smile off her face with his knuckles. "Do you like the sound of your voice? I dare guess the sewer you sleep in is never graced with any others."

He adds luring her to his bed to his list of goals for today.

As if she can hear his thoughts, another slap is administered. She asks him again his business breaking into her tower.

"A business trip, you could say. Coming to your tower wasn't my intention."

"And yet your destination."

"Yet, yes. But you see, lassie, there's an imperial guard eating dirt in your vicinity owing to me, and I do owe him a ride home. The trip here was just a sightseeing stop."

From her belt's satchel she pulls out a crown, the gemstones glinting purple and blue in the sunlight. "It was, now?"

~x~x~x~

Yuck is convinced now that her hair is actually painted steel wiring, and that his own bones are peanut brittle. He thinks this is so owing to the way she can pull him up and up and let him drop, over and over and over unto he's too groggy with pain with head trauma to really register the lift anymore. A few jagged pieces of ribs might be nibbling on the skin of his lungs, as well.

Maybe he shouldn't have spat in her face: It was a heuristic reaction.

Her voice, in its infuriatingly-chipper pleasantness, rings across the coppice:_ "I'd sooner buuuuuuy defying gravity. Kiss me goodbyyyyyyye, I'm defying gravity!" _She breaks the rhythm of the song to fit a new one, that her dropping her prisoner a few feet before abruptly yanking him up a few more._ "And—you can't—puuuuuuuul—me down!" (1) _

Out of the corner of his swollen eye, he sees that he's been made level with window once again. Yin, one foot across her hair, cups his chin, their noses almost touching as she softly coos, "It's too bad you're bringing these punishments on yourself; your visage was not half-horrible without all the black and the blue."

"Was it now, then?" He puckers his lips quick, just barely kissing her. Suddenly he's swinging his body weight towards her, lead be damned, their lips mashing together with blood from spilt lips seeping past her own and—

She pushes him away, stumbling back, and he plummets as she sputters out the copper taste of his blood. She rushes to the window, almost falling herself as she leans over it, grabbing her hair in just enough time to hover him an inch about the ground. _"Pig!"_ she screams, and though she can't see it, she knows he's grinning.

She spits the word at him again. And the last of his blood.

_It's not too late to kill him. _

Yin sighs. That is true, but there is something she has to do before that. Something she has to try.

Humming, she begins to gather up her hair, looping the heavy length around her arm. The lad gives her a sly grin. "Oh, was that your first kiss?"

"First sexual harassment." Blue eyes roll. "Now, the crown that was on your person, does its owner not have a festival every year around this time?

"If you already know—"

Another magical slap. "The sun is not some isolated symbol. I simply desire reassurance. Now, how far_ away_ is this kingdom from the tower?"

He furrows his eyebrows, before gingerly replaying, "Not a day, if ya have Hermes' sandals." _(2)_

A genuine smile breaks across her face, and she takes out the crown, twirling it about her fingers like a child's silver loop. A bubbly giggle escapes her lips. "Have you ever read_ Journey to the West?" _

"What?"

"Oh, yes, your likes can only read 'beer', 'ale', and 'private entertainment', am I not mistaken? Well, suffice to say, this kingdom's emblem is not the only Sun I shall be dealing with today."

~X~X~X

(1) 'Defying Gravity' from the musical _Wicked._ Music and lyrics are by Stephen Schwartz.

(2) Unless I'm misremembering it, the Greek God Hermes had wings on his sandals that enabled him with the speed necessary to be the messenger of the gods.


End file.
